Mar 10, 2013

Article Marketing Works

By Adair Jones


Answer to the question, "What is article marketing?" you need to know what makes the internet tick. Search Engines become the organizer of all content and ranks it by words. It just so happens that articles are made up of words, and within these words are keywords, that are searched by people who get valuable advise, become traffic to your website, and hopefully conversions of sales or signups.

Search engines like Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Yandex, Dogpile, Excite, Webcrawler, MSN, and others all search content by words. You can get specific search engines to search specific topics: Food/Recipes - Yummly and RecipeBridge; Jobs - Monster.com, Hotjobs.com, CareerBuilder.com, Craigslist; Medical - WebMD, Bing Health, Healthline; Multimedia - YouTube, Pixsta, Bing Videos, Yahoo Video, Podscope. You get the point. Writing articles for specific reasons can be indexed and ranked with relative engines.

Think about how you go about looking for something online. You go to your search engine, or in a video site, or a retail website, or in a social site. The internet is organized thru searches. Indexing sites and finding relevant content to match what someone typed in the search bar is what engines do with the help of spiderbots, little programs crawling over websites. Understand that spiderbots nor search engines can actually read. They can not translate what you mean either. They simply word match, so specific words return more specific search results.

So how is Article Marketing - writing articles - a method of internet marketing? Well, first off, it is strictly content. Content is king and search engines love it because new fresh articles are added everyday to authority sites such as ezine publishers, which gives the spiders new material to crawl, and it contains links for spiders to crawl for more relative content. Spiders cannot read pictures, videos, or flash content. They can, however, read the captions, descriptions, metatags, related keywords, titles, comments, dates, etc. associated to those pics and vids.

Here is something to think about. Remember the movie, I Robot, with Will Smith? The website for that movie had zero words on the site, it was all flash and video, and any words that were included were in the videos, which the search engine spiders could not read. But this main site ranked at the top of all the search engines, having no content. Why? Because all of the other sites out there placing content about I Robot, like articles, reviews, thoughts, comments, ratings, and discussions, all pointed back to the I Robot website, ranking it at the top. This is link reputation at its finest.

Knowing how other networks of sites can rank a particular site is how you will rank your site - with writing articles. The submission of an article a day will begin to leverage your blog from all of the links you include in your signature. The more valuable the content, the better the click through to your site, the better ranking you will get. Write what your site is about, but in specific areas of your niche, and center on relative keywords. So if your site is about roses, write articles on grafting species, and fertilizing, and pruning, soil conditions, etc. Don't write about dog treats, and point the article towards a roses blog. That will just hurt your ranking.

Write an article a day, two if you have the time, or you can outsource it. You must be consistent though. Over time, your articles published with high ranking authority sites will begin to generate traffic and even produce leads and sales if your links are pointing in the right directions. Articles, once published, are there forever and each has a link or two in your signature section of each article that points back to your website where you can convert traffic into leads and sales, or a link that points straight to a capture page or sales page. Your articles will be searched and found by people who want your content, like what you said, and follow you to your blog or purchase from you. It's like coming across a magazine that is months old, reading an article, liking it so much that you went to the recommended website, and bought something related to the article.

Example: An article in a 2 year old magazine, sitting in the waiting room while you wait, catches your attention on how the Sun affects our vision. You learn that UV rays can filter through clouds and still do permanent damage to your retinas, and how wearing the proper sunglasses can reduce this harmful exposure. At the end of the article, you realize that your dollar store sunglasses are not protecting you, and you tear out the article so that you can go to the recommended sunglass retailer's website and choose from their huge selection of glasses, and purchase a pair (or two).

This is a free marketing tool, but it is not the quick fix for ranking. What it does provide, is a long lasting stream of leads and traffic to convert. This foundation should be every marketers little bag of secrets.

Did you read this article to learn more about Article Marketing, or to learn how to generate more leads that convert to sales or signups?



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